4 Quick Wins: Improving Mobile Marketing Campaign Performance

The “Stories From the Mobile Marketing Trenches” blog series chronicles tips, tricks, and best practices from Liftoff employees who work day in, day out with many mobile marketers. They ensure success and happiness by defining upfront campaign goals and tracking success metrics with their clients.

Mobile marketing campaigns are only as successful as they’re set up to be. But that doesn’t mean a languishing campaign cannot be saved from the jaws of low ROI, or that a solid performer can’t be propelled to the next level with these quick wins.

Quick Win #1: Track Your Entire Funnel

Define your funnel with high, mid and low funnel postbacks. Marketers focused on the bottom line may be tempted to track only the highest value in-app-purchase or subscription events. But the intermediary events such as free trials, signups, registrations, or game play milestones are critical for detecting the quality of lead flow from install to post install-engagement. As important as it is to meet the campaign’s ultimate goals, those goals also cannot be achieved at scale without a healthy flow of higher funnel activity.

Quick Win #2: Enable All Postbacks

Enable all postback data from all marketing partners, not just the data attributed to a single partner. In the programmatic space, statistically significant data is king. The more data a machine learning algorithm has to ingest, the better the performance and the faster it is attained.

Additionally, when enabling all postbacks, users that have been acquired through other marketing partners can be identified and suppressed, thus eliminating duplicative spend and increasing campaign efficiency. With hashing safeguards, data has never been safer, so do your campaign a favor and let ALL of your data work for you from the start.

Quick Win #3: Performance Over Beauty

Creatives aren’t a beauty contest, so let performance drive your ad appearance decisions. Oftentimes, the best performing creatives run counter intuitive to what we might think because they aren’t necessarily the most aesthetic. We see this time and time again.

A leading subscription video on demand service client of ours proved this. They ran two ads: 1) one showing close-up headshots of popular TV stars, and 2) the other simply had their logo and a “Get One Month Free” button.

On first glance, the first aesthetically pleasing ad clearly draws viewers in more due to the actors. The second ad, however, performed better with more than a 280% increase in installs over the first ad. This might be due to a number of reasons: less clutter, larger CTA, clearer indication that you will go to an app, etc.

The graphically-rich ads generally cannot hold a candle to a dynamic ad in terms of click-through rate, click-to-install rate and most importantly, conversion rate. Liftoff creatives have been designed to not only be brand safe, but to draw in users that will engage and use the app repeatedly.

Quick Win #4: Re-Engage Inactive Users

Don’t give up on users that have become inactive. Inactive users have already shown intent by downloading your app in the first place. Consider re-engaging these users who have dipped their toes in the water with an install by drawing them back down the funnel.

For larger developers, another effective approach is retargeting existing engaged users with cross-pollination campaigns across to other apps. This will likely boost intent and awareness, so is always a good thing to have running.

Thanks for reading, we hope these pro tips help propel your mobile campaign performance to an even better place. If you are missing out on any of these quick wins in your existing campaigns, contact us!

Josh has been at Liftoff as a Customer Success Manager since early 2015, based out of the New York office. He’s been working in the ad-tech space since 2013. In his spare time, he chases his cat and 2 dogs around his tiny Manhattan apartment.